In this episode, they dive into the idea of taking back our stories as women. Elle and Susie explain what this means, why it matters, and how to get started. They share beautiful insights on bringing into awareness the conditioning and cultural messages hidden in our subconscious that affect us, and also teach us about the Enneagram, a powerful personality typology that will help you see your ego defenses more clearly.

Subscribe and listen to the full episode here(you must subscribe to receive latest episode).

Highlighted Excerpt:

Majo: You really urge readers, the women reading your book, to take back their own story. So let’s say I’m someone listening to this episode, getting really excited, and thinking, I’m ready to take back my story. But at the same time I could be thinking, Woah, that sounds like a big job.

Where do I begin? What’s the point of entry to begin to reclaim our stories?

Elle: One of the organizing principles that Susie and I chose for our book is the labyrinth. And I would say for anyone listening who’s beginning to ask questions and thinking about their own journey is to look to the labyrinth as a wonderful symbol. Because in the labyrinth there are no tricky turns, no roadblocks. The path and the journey through the labyrinth flows like water.

We can see the shape of spirals coming up in nature. We see it in the spiral of a shell or in the way that water funnels down. And as you think about your own journey, even though sometimes we just want to get from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible, the journey is really much more meandering and spiraling. It has its own rhythm and cadence and there’s no right or wrong way to do it.

The book is really designed to help the reader spiral to the center of their own story. One of the quotes that we included at the beginning of the book is, “The point of a maze is to find its center, and the point of a labyrinth is to find your center.”

Majo: One of the places you start is in talking about culture, and a woman’s cultural story. I love how you pepper little exercises throughout this book, and one of them is ‘quick association’. Like, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of what single mothers are, or what politicians are… I’m just curious, why do you feel it’s important to teach that? This idea of how we come up with these quick associations of other people.

Susie: Well, the idea is to get to what is not heard or seen, but what we react from. So it’s like this idea that we’re in water, but we don’t know what water is because we’re in it all the time. Or like our air.

So we don’t see that things are impacting us. But if we have little ways of triggering those hidden messages about women in our subconscious, and we bring them to the surface, it gives us more agency. More power.